In memoriam of Peter Cooper Hewitt

ree
: a
reer Pree ToL
oer Clip oa ne a eden
a eer
‘ erent

ST ikccierepearprnare atte
Boa ee ered he er ere eaten it
“ ‘ z penne s firemer ser eee anes spree Peet ent
Se trea een aire tetra om ae nar eooe
Psi ee ere Le ere Oe iat a er a a
i es Ee ee OT re :
renee per aes er aaa

" reer. eaerene rece ite
Wier NOR ny tier apy oeeenton eee a
ee ee aN ae tere EE nT
pose rer icart nomenon. ed
er eae ee eras eaten ElY
= eres

ere

permet

rere acura aren
canine

y r
ee ee payne ao eset TE here sararie
Repeat ene ae ereneeey entree
anererget ht laa eer ares ee ee FOr ee ate
eee eps
eamener te Neate eT a geet tit ee ae
o S

ot

aerate

eT cte :

peer ees Le Laer

eee YOY PO arate
eek Lh Serene

reat
G om

| «
.
Cooper-1> 0" Museum Library °

2 East viar Street

New York, New York 10028

_

a

PETER COOPER HEWITT

IN MEMORIAM -—

LIBRARY OF THE

COOPER-HEWITT MUSEUM OF DESIGN

* SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION «

Yo
was)
Sle

In MEmMorIAM
OF
PETER COOPER HEWITT
BY

MICHAEL PUPIN, PH.D., SC.D., LL.D.
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

the day when I came to this country as an im-
migrant boy, forty-eight years ago. He was one
of the group of Americans represented in a picture
called “Men of Progress” which I first saw at
Cooper’s Union, many years ago. Soon after that I saw
the great man himself in person during one of his fre-
quent visits to Cooper’s Union, an institution which he
founded, in whose welfare he was deeply interested,
and to which he devoted much of his personal atten-
tion. I was enrolled in the evening classes of this in-
stitution and made much use of its Library. I made
every effort to understand the character and the life
of its distinguished Founder. Little | thought at that
time that some day in the distant future his talented
and famous grandson, Peter Cooper Hewitt, would be-
come one of my dearest friends. ?
The impression which Peter Cooper Hewitt made
upon me when I first met him, twenty-five years ago,

Pea COOPER was one of the great men of

suggested a strong resemblance to his distinguished
grandfather, Peter Cooper. But there were many ele-
ments in Peter Cooper Hewitt’s personality which I did
not understand; they puzzled me, but they fascinated
me. He was not an ordinary man in any sense of the
word. What he said was not easily understood at
first, and what he did was apparently even more inacces-
sible to the understanding of people who did not know
him personally. It was puzzling, almost mystifying.
But both the way he managed his words and the method
he pursued in his work were fascinating and arrested
attention. It took me some little time to become
familiar with his unusual ways of saying and doing
things, and then, finally, he became as clear as the dew-
drop of a summer morning.

Peter Cooper Hewitt’s personality both as man and
as scientist could not be completely understood without
understanding first the history of his life, and the his-
tory was unique. It is a record of unusual training
producing extraordinary results. From his grandfather,
Peter Cooper, he inherited a genius for mechanisms.
His natural tendency in this direction was encouraged in
every respect both by his grandfather and by his par-
ents, the late Abram S. Hewitt and his wife, who was
Peter Cooper’s only daughter. In the homestead on
Lexington Avenue Peter Cooper installed a workshop
in an old greenhouse in the yard for the practice of the
useful arts and crafts like carpentry, forging, lathe
work, turning, etc. In this historic shop he gave his
grandchildren their first practical training, providing
master mechanics to carry out his own ideas in this

matter. This was the first training school in which
Peter Cooper Hewitt enjoyed the guiding hand of his
illustrious grandfather. This was the beginning of that
end which made Hewitt a skilled workman in many
of the mechanical arts. No practical mechanical
problem requiring skill and dexterity was ever known
to embarrass him. Many stories are told in the Hewitt
family illustrating young Cooper Hewitt’s wonderful
resourcefulness as a mechanician and artisan. His early
knowledge of the steamboat, of the steam locomotive,
of freight-cars, and of other mechanisms was based
upon experience which he gained while building these
mechanisms with his own hands. That knowledge was
made richer by contributions of his own inventive
genius, a genius which he also inherited from his illus-
trious grandfather. While still a mere boy he informed
his father that brakes on cars in a train should all be
controlled from a single spot in the train, an idea which
a number of years later was put into practice in the
Westinghouse air-brake.

His interest in electrical phenomena was stimulated
by machines which he himself built, and it was much
intensified by Bell’s invention of the telephone. Many
a telephone instrument he himself made, and, long be-
fore the theory of the telephone was completely worked
out, he knew, from his personal experience gained in
his manufacture of the instrument and from the
experiments he performed with it, which were the es-
sential and which the non-essential elements in the
construction of a telephone. His knowledge found
its way into Hewitt’s brains through his hands. Those

who knew him well and gained that knowledge by
watching him at work always felt that a part, at
least, of Hewitt’s thinking apparatus was in his hands.
They seemed to guide his brain, whereas they moved
just like the hands of a great piano player, always
landing at the correct spot without any apparent
guidance from external forces. This precision in the
action of his hands manifested itself not only in his
scientific experiments, but also in sports and in
the manipulation of musical instruments, which he
handled with surpassing grace. To watch him skate
and dance convinced one that Hewitt’s whole body and
every part of it showed the same rare grace which one
observed in the action of his hands. There was a
wonderful rhythm in all of Hewitt’s movements. His
thinking machinery appeared to be distributed equally
over his whole body and not confined to a single part,
the brain. The treasures of his mind were stored in
every part of his body and not in his brain only.

With ordinary intelligence knowledge starts with ab-
stract principles; it starts with science and ends with
art. In the case of Hewitt art came first, as it were by
intuition, and its fundamental principles were then de-
rived from it by a sort of mental distillation. Roses
first and then the essence of roses. It is not surprising
that educational methods such as were practised at the
time when Hewitt was a youth could do very little for
him. That explains why he never graduated at Stevens
Institute, where, as in every other technical school of
that time, they paid almost exclusive attention to the
abstract sciences of engineering and built up their sub-

jects by starting from fundamental principles. This
was a strange procedure for a youth like Hewitt, and
he never became reconciled to it. He admitted, how-
ever, that his own method of acquiring knowledge was
not applicable to the average youth, and its universal
adoption would result in the weeding out of most
students of our engineering schools, a result which, in
the opinion of many people, might be a blessing.

Hewitt’s researches in the electrical science were
always his favorite occupation. They began in his
early youth and were conducted in his own somewhat
unacademic way. His laboratory was not equipped in
accordance with ordinary academic ideas which de-
manded that an electrical laboratory should have in its
equipment such and such apparatus and instruments.
Hewitt designed his own instruments and apparatus in
accordance with the demands of the particular problem
which was before him. Often they looked crude to an
academically trained eye, but a closer scrutiny revealed
the surprising fact that they were just the thing which
suited the requirements of the particular investiga-
tion, and yielded wonderful results when operated by
Hewitt’s artistic touch.

Hewitt’s mental attitude was that of an inventor,
and he was an inventor of the purest type. He was
most prolific, but this is not the place nor am I qualified
to review the long list of his many inventions. No
inventor has ever lived who produced more than one
epoch-making invention, and the number of those who
thus impressed their genius upon their epoch is ex-
tremely small. Hewitt is one of this small number.

His mercury vapor lamp and everything which fol-
lowed in its wake was epoch-making. Photography,
lithography, illumination of docks and factories, and
many other uses to which this lamp was put furnish
a splendid testimony supporting my statement. To
obtain that remarkable result required experimental
study of a very high order, and that too in a depart-
ment of the electrical science which was less developed
than any other part of this science. I refer to the
motion of electricity through rarefied gases and vapors.
He was the first to establish clearly the new physical
fact that the reacting force at the negative electrode
was the most determining factor in these motions, and
he was the first to find a means of overcoming this re-
action. When he discovered that, the rest followed as
an obvious result.

The Cooper Hewitt mercury vapor lamp was only
one of the applications of Hewitt’s discovery. The mer-
cury vapor rectifier is a logical sequence of the lamp and
not much less important in its technical significance.
The rectifying characteristic of electrodes in a rarefied
gas is one of the pillars of wireless telephony and teleg-
raphy of to-day. Hewitt was the first to recognize its
importance and to employ it in the wireless art; the fact
that others obtained a patent for the procedure does not
in my opinion prove that others had a priority in the
pioneer work which led to the discovery. That priority
belongs to Hewitt. I am also in a position to state here
without any reservation that Hewitt was the first dis-
coverer of the third or the pilot electrode, usually called
the “grid,” which, inserted in the path of moving elec-

tricity in a vacuum tube and suitably electrified, can
influence that motion to any extent and in any way we
please. That is the backbone of the modern vacuum
tube amplifier, which is to-day playing a most eminent
part in the modern methods of electrical transmission
of intelligence.

In recognition of these splendid achievements Colum-
bia University conferred upon him the honorary degree
of Doctor of Science.

Among Hewitt’s mechanical inventions which I must
mention here, even if only very briefly, is his helicopter,
a flying-machine which rises up perpendicularly and
soars with perfect steadiness at any height. Hewitt
developed this machine in partnership with the late
Professor F. B. Crocker, of Columbia University. All
the calculations and all the experimental data, obtained
from a full-sized model, were completed and ready for
use, when suddenly Crocker died in June, and Hewitt
followed him only two months later. | hope that this
splendid work will not have been done in vain.

Federal authorities may object to my discussion of
the aérial torpedo. The existence of the thing itself is
known and has been referred to in the public press.
That which is not known is the fact that Hewitt, as a
member of the Naval Consulting Board, was the in-
ventor of this wonderful instrument of war.

The inventor of the highest type is a man of imagina-
tion and of artistic taste. Hewitt was lavishly equipped
with both of these heavenly gifts. Hence as a com-
panion and as a host he was unsurpassed. To be a
guest in his artistic home was a treat never to be for-

gotten. It was a home where art, science, spirituality,
and everything which represents the best elements of
our American civilization were harmoniously blended.
Peter Cooper Hewitt was a worthy descendant of his
illustrious grandfather, Peter Cooper, and of his bril-
liant father, the late Abram S. Hewitt.

nc
ee ecans
Sahara cae

ee waar
ar ad . =e
a Se et ET
: a need ou
an et Pe ato

Cea ere

pampered
sae

pathic nar
poe Oe
wate ot nn a Lk tee ten

enn
ea
as
ta a I hs pete ae
tee OO ele
Seen enters Sie
= Ss ees
pie eat tet
ee ee naan
aa
meres
ap be OTOL head
a
ee ete te
pent ae
oon